Helmut Kohl, provincial warhorse

LONDON — Helmut Kohl, who has died at the age of 87, was not only the longest-serving of postwar German chancellors, winning four elections from 1982 to 1998. He was, and remained, the most provincial, sniggered at by many Germans for his homely cardigans, strong regional accent, and habit of inflicting his favorite dish of pork belly on visiting statesman — which rendered this very tall man so corpulent that it was remarkable even for Germany.

In 1976, when this portly and distinctly uncosmopolitan politician arrived in Bonn as the new leader of the CDU in the Bundestag, not even he could have imagined that his claim on history would be that of the “great European” who more than anyone understood the importance, after German unification in 1990, of ensuring “a European Germany, not a German Europe.” Events shaped the man, rather than the other way round.

Franz Josef Strauss, the rambunctious leader of the Bavarian Christian Social Union famously passed public judgment that Kohl was unlikely to have any claim on history at all, unhelpfully declaring shortly before the 1976 election that he was in no way fitted for the chancellorship. “He is completely incapable,” Strauss told a conference in Munich. “He lacks the character, and he lacks the intellectual and political qualifications. He lacks everything.”

Kohl, who rather deftly morphed that country bumpkin image into the “man of the people” persona that helped him to successive election victories, had the last laugh. As he liked to say, “I have been underestimated for decades. I have done very well that way.”

Born on April 3, 1930 in the rural southern backwater of Ludwigshafen am Rhein, the third child of a modest family of devout Roman Catholics, Helmut Josef Michael Kohl was old enough to retain an acute memory of the reality of Hitler’s Germany, but young enough by a whisker to escape the last-ditch battles in which his elder brother was killed, still in his teens.

He went to university after the war, the first in his family to do so, studying first law and then political science. His doctorate, tellingly, was on the postwar reconstruction of political parties in his native Rhineland-Palatinate. Although he then worked in businesses for a time back in Ludwigshafen, politics was his life from the moment in 1946, when he was only 16, that he joined the youth wing of the newly minted CDU.

Young Helmut spent the next 20 years clambering up through the ranks of local politics, emerging in 1969 as minister-president of Rhineland-Palatinate, the youngest person ever to have been elected to govern a German Bundesland, as the country’s powerful federal states are known. He was making himself a national name as a liberal reformer within his party. He had also honed the “Kohl system” of government, granting favors on tough political terms, which made him a close-to-invincible machine politician who demanded absolute loyalty, and who took no prisoners if opposed.

It was political skill that first carried him to power in 1982. A split over economic policy had opened between the ruling Social Democrats then led by the urbane Helmut Schmidt and the more free-market Free Democrats (FDP). Deftly seizing his chance, Kohl persuaded the FDP to switch sides, and three days later, the Bundestag voted in a CDU/CSU/FDP government with Kohl as chancellor. Controversially, he then promptly forced the dissolution of parliament by contriving to lose a vote of confidence, opening the way to his resounding first electoral victory in March 1983.

Franco-German cooperation

The 1980s were halcyon years for West Germans, affluent citizens of the established economic powerhouse of Europe. Kohl rewarded the voters generously, expanding unemployment, maternity and child benefits and making early retirement a financially attractive option. But he was not afraid to take unpopular decisions: against impassioned opposition from Germany’s large peace movement, one of his first foreign policy moves was to push through the stationing on German soil of NATO midrange nuclear missiles.

In this he was encouraged by François Mitterrand, the Socialist French president whom Kohl cultivated with the express intention of making the “ever closer union” of Western Europe a Franco-German project. In 1984, the two men linked hands at Verdun, scene of one of the deadliest Franco-German battles of the Great War, a gesture that powerfully affirmed the two countries’ reconciliation.

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was the transforming event of Kohl’s career, catapulting him onto the center of the world stage.

It was to become a powerful but in many ways an unlikely alliance. Politically the two were miles apart; and, besides, Mitterrand never fully reciprocated the chancellor’s enthusiasm for lock-step partnership. Rather like Italy’s Giulio Andreotti, who famously quipped that he loved Germany so much that he would always want there to be two of her, Mitterrand was suspicious to the last of German unification.

The fateful 1992 Treaty of Maastricht that created the single European currency owed its origins to Mitterrand’s determination to tie united Germany down, and Kohl’s eagerness to prove — even at the cost of surrendering the Deutschmark — that modern Germany was the very model of a perfect European. (In an interview with a German doctoral student in 2002, the year the euro was introduced, Kohl said that he never held a referendum on giving up the Deutschmark for one good reason: “I would have lost, and by seven to three.” On the euro, he said, he had acted like a dictator.)

Wall falls, Kohl rises

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was the transforming event of Kohl’s career, catapulting him onto the center of the world stage. There is no evidence that he, any more than most Germans, expected the collapse of the communist regime; indeed, in a gesture of détente he had invited Erich Honecker to Bonn only two years earlier, the first and last visit to West Germany by an East German head of state.

In the weeks before the Wall came down, as first tens, then hundreds and then thousands of East Germans thronged to West German embassies across Eastern Europe, it was the German foreign minister Hans Dietrich Genscher who did most of the diplomatic legwork.

Angela Merkel pushed Helmut Kohl towards the exit by publicly urging the CDU to move on without its “old warhorse” | Daniel Roland/AFP via Getty Images

Kohl had something quite different on his mind — surviving a strong challenge to his leadership of the party by Lothar Späth, then governor of Baden-Württemberg, at the mid-September CDU convention. The evolving drama in Eastern Europe was nonetheless what saved him, CDU veterans recall. Hungary, flooded with East Germans waiting to be allowed to leave for the West, was pondering opening its border to Austria. A few days before the convention, Kohl took time to meet secretly with Hungary’s prime minister Miklós Németh and offer him generous German aid. In turn, Németh opened the border while the convention was in session: at the news, Kohl was again the party’s hero.

Cometh the hour, cometh the man. When the Wall fell, Kohl moved like lightning, rushing out a ten-point plan for “overcoming the division of Germany and Europe” without pausing to consult Germany’s Western allies. He also declared that the old German territories east of the Oder-Neisse line, transferred to Poland in 1945, would definitively remain Polish. That helped him, in February 1990, to secure a pledge from Mikhail Gorbachev that Moscow would allow German unification to succeed.

In May, after a newly formed counterpart to the CDU in East Germany had trounced the Left in elections, Kohl signed a treaty with East Germany that set the country on a fast track to unification. On October 3, East Germany ceased to exist.

He made one extraordinary, innumerate, pig-headed, mistake that has lastingly damaged Germany, Europe, and Kohl’s cherished dream of a united Europe. Ignoring the advice of Karl Otto Pöhl, the president of Germany’s deeply respected Central Bank, the chancellor announced that a 1:1 exchange rate between the Ostmark and the Deutschmark would prevail.

For a few weeks, East Germans felt rich beyond their dreams. But they soon discovered the cost of this free lunch as the East’s industrial fabric collapsed, businesses closed, and jobs evaporated. Out of a workforce of 9.75 million, 4.4 million had lost their jobs by 1993.

Pöhl had been right to argue that even a 3:1 exchange rate would overstate the real value of the Ostmark. East Germany’s economy was not just suffering a temporary collapse. It had never remotely resembled the socialist success story that propaganda made out. East German productivity was less than a third of that in the West, meaning that even as old Soviet bloc export markets dried up, factories forced to pay West German wages were unable to compete.

The “blossoming landscapes” Kohl had promised the Ossies became a rustbelt where the only boom industry was demolition. Instead of financing investment, the massive transfers to East Germany from West German taxpayers were mostly absorbed by unemployment benefits.

Across East Germany, graffiti scrawled the words Verraten und Verkauft — Deceived and Sold Out. As West Germany, too, plunged into recession, Wessies grumbled at the Ossies’ ingratitude. By 1998, amid mounting unemployment, Kohl’s star had set and he was heavily defeated in that year’s election by the SPD’s Gerhard Schröder. Then, in 1999, he became heavily embroiled in a party financing scandal, for accepting DM2 million in anonymous donations whose source he stubbornly refused to reveal.

Kohl combined an invincible belief in himself with a distaste for detail — a not unusual, but somewhat perilous, combination for a political leader.

A politician who considered himself equal to the great Prince Otto von Bismarck became a nonperson. In 2000, he resigned as party chairman after his handpicked successor, Angela Merkel, pushed him towards the exit by publicly urging the CDU to move on without its “old warhorse.” A year later, his wife Hannelore committed suicide. Kohl, who never forgot or forgave a slight, retreated into embittered retirement, injudiciously pouring out his loathing of the “traitors” within his party, detailed in 600 hours of taped interviews with a journalist with whom he then quarreled.

Not even Gorbachev, without whose agreement unification would have been slow, difficult and even risky, escaped being classed a failure. As for Merkel, he dismissed her as a no-nothing Mädchen incapable even of “holding a fork and knife properly,” let alone conducting European policy. Venom late in life is not rare; but it is particularly depressing in high achievers. That said, the two leaders could hardly be more different in style.

Kohl combined an invincible belief in himself with a distaste for detail — a not unusual, but somewhat perilous, combination for a political leader. One episode illustrates the point. Early in Margaret Thatcher’s premiership, Germany lodged a strong complaint against Britain for allowing acid rain pollution, drifting across the North Sea with the prevailing southwesterly winds, to pollute German forests. Thatcher, a chemist by training, summoned an army of scientists to prepare for her meeting with Kohl on the subject. Emerging from more than two hours of one-on-one discussion, Kohl was asked how it had gone. “Never,” he growled, “Never do I want to hear one word about acid rain. Never again.”

This may help to explain why he appears not for a single instant to have entertained the possibility that his mishandling of the economics of unification was an error, so cardinal that it weakens his otherwise deserved reputation as an admirably committed European. Not only Germany, but the rest of Europe paid dearly for it – and it is still paying.

The immediate effect was that in the 1990s, Europe’s engine of growth abruptly lost its pulling power. Not only that, but to offset the inflationary impact of massive public spending, Germany hiked its interest rate; and because in the 1990s most European economies were pegged to the Deutschmark in the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, other recession-hit countries had no choice but to follow suit.

Then, with the adoption of the euro in 2002, the European Central Bank kept the unified interest rate low in order to steer Germany out of the doldrums – far too low for the good of booming economies of Spain and Ireland, yet low enough for governments like Greece to embark on the mother of spending sprees on tick. The euro, which Kohl declared to be “a synonym for Europe”, has become at the time of his death a synonym for discord. The Franco-German partnership is badly frayed, as are tempers throughout the Eurozone as it grapples with the bankruptcy of Greece. Germany did indeed stage an export-led recovery; at the expense, many now charge, of its partners in Eurozone. Conversely, the majority of Germans would have voted against giving up the Deutschmark in the 1990s because they feared that in a currency union without an economic and fiscal union, Germany would end up paying the bill. As, largely, it has.

Kohl, a virtuoso in Realpolitik who at his best combined realism with compassion and even vision, ended his life inhabiting a world more like that of Lewis Carrol’s Through the Looking Glass. He accused Angela Merkel of destroying, with her emphasis on rules and technocratic solutions, faith in the closeknit European family he worked hard to create. “Sie macht meinen Europe kaput”, he complained – “she is destroying my Europe”. As they tried to put his shattered frame together again, Humpty Dumpty no doubt felt much the same about all the king’s men.

Rosemary Righter, an associate editor with The Times of London, was that newspaper’s chief editorial writer for most of Kohl’s time as chancellor.